Simple Stir Fry Sauce Recipe: From Scratch

One of the most important things I keep in my fridge is a sauce I’ve developed that mimics typical simple stir fry sauces I’ve tasted in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the USA.

I’ll keep it all as basic as I can, using ingredients you may have in your kitchen already.

Simple Stir Fry Sauce Recipe: Ingredients

1pt corn starch

1pt sugar

1pt red pepper

<1pt crushed garlic

1pt vinegar

3pt soy sauce

3pt rice* wine

*or white

Every single one of those ingredients should be readily available to you, almost anywhere in the world. They create the basis for a nondescript “simple stir fry sauce” that can be used in a variety of dishes. Here in Taiwan, I see similar flavors used for teppanyaki as I do in the USA for kung pao chicken, so it’s really hard to say what any sauce actually is.

Depending on how you blend this sauce, it will give you slightly different results. If you want a less spicy sauce, use less pepper, or use more to kick it up a notch. If you want a gooier sauce, use more corn starch. If you want a more garlicy sauce, add more garlic. This sauce is designed to assault your taste buds with a simple and elegant array of flavors without overwhelming any of them, unless you so choose.

What you are about to see takes 20 minutes from start to finish, from dry bottle to finished meal.

Simple Stir Fry Sauce Recipe

Shake it until everything looks dispersed, then give it a hard shake every minute or two to disperse all the ingredients.

There are a few roads you can take from here. I often use this simple stir fry sauce to cook chicken with peanuts or beef with broccoli; it’s really hard to find things that don’t work for it. It’s extremely versatile. But, for what you’re about to see, I used

Shake up the simple stir fry sauce and pour some in (in this case, around a cup of sauce); it will immediately sizzle (which is why I like to use a saucepan).

As always: keep it moving.

Once everything is coated and the sauce has cooked down to your liking, pour it into serving dish; this should take less than five minutes.

The sauce will solidify more as it cools.

Then just serve it with rice.

Here’s the glamour shot.

That’s a fast and often-considered “exotic” meal, using basic cooking methods (i.e. stirring stuff in a saucepan) and readily-available ingredients. With this simple stir fry sauce recipe, it’s easy to create an impressive meal from scratch with less effort than most people realize.